Former Visiting Professor, UBC Faculty of Education
Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University
Email: decaste@gmail.com
“I’ve always been fascinated by edges and barriers, borders, and limits—mostly how to skate along edges, break down barriers, cross borders, and test limits. Since joining the academy as a beginning assistant professor at SFU (in 1978!), my primary interests have been in critical media and communications studies, in understanding how the tools we use shape—and greatly limit—the ways we think as well as what and how we communicate. I’m especially interested in “pedagogic communications”—that is, in how education has been and continues to be shaped by both traditional and emerging, leading edge, media for learning. Beginning with critical literacy studies in the 80’s, then multiliteracies and multisensoriality in the 90’s, on to new media and technology studies in the 00’s, and then a long spate of faculty administration work, including a bout of Deaning at SFU then at UOIT, most of my work in recent years has been in digital game studies and learning through play. And while the research I’ve done in the past has largely been qualitative, I’ve also been working over the last many years on using virtual environments as experimental labs for conducting some VERY traditional quantitative research on gender and navigation in virtual space.
I’ve edited several books, published far too many articles, worked on several game projects, done heaps of community work, carried out a dozen or more SSHRC funded research projects, and supervised many wonderful graduate students, including 10 outstanding doctorates in the bunch. So that’s the very mixed bag of tricks that I hope will contribute to the MET community, where I’m looking forward to helping build new course offerings in educational media studies and digital games research.”
Dr. de Castell is the author and original instructor of ETEC 534, and of the completely revised ETEC 511 course launched in 2021. She also co-authored and co-taught ETEC 544, and pioneered the Digital Games & Learning Summer Institute for MET.